and wait. I have no idea where Callie lived, but it’s obvious Hurley does as he heads straight for downtown. Chicago is well-known for its traffic backups and bottlenecks, but at the moment traffic is relatively light so we manage to make pretty good time. Fifteen minutes later Hurley turns into a parking garage, grabs a ticket stub, and parks.
He undoes his seat belt and reaches for his door handle. “Stay here.”
“Unh-unh, I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.” I open my door and get out of the car before he can object again.
He gives me a perturbed look, gets out on his side, and scans the surrounding area. Then he leans on the roof of the car, looks me straight in the eye, and says, “I’m about to break the law and I don’t want you involved. I need you to wait in the car. I don’t have time to argue about it.”
“Then don’t. Besides, it’s a little late to be worrying about legalities and principles, don’t you think? You dragged me into this and I’ve got a lot on the line at this point, so I’m coming along whether you like it or not.” I fold my arms over my chest and set my jaw to show him I mean what I say.
He stares at me a moment, no doubt gauging the depth of my conviction. Apparently he decides I’m serious because he reaches into the car, pops the trunk, and then slams his door closed. “Christ, you are a stubborn woman,” he mutters. He stomps around and opens the trunk, rummages inside it, and slips something into his jacket pocket. Then he hands me two pairs of latex gloves. “Stick these in your purse,” he tells me. “We’ll need them once we’re inside but I don’t want to put them on yet because it might attract attention.”
I do as instructed and, once he has closed the trunk, follow him out onto the street. We walk several blocks until we reach one with a large four-storied brick apartment building. I follow Hurley up the stairs to the central door, which is locked. There is a number pad built into the wall next to it and after looking up and down the street, presumably to see if anyone is watching, Hurley says, “Give me one of the gloves.”
I fish one out of my purse and hand it to him. He wraps it around one finger, palming the rest of it in his hand. Then he punches in a four-digit number. The door lock releases with a little click and, still using the glove, Hurley pulls it open.
“How do you know Callie still lives here?” I ask him as we step inside.
He doesn’t answer me right away. Instead he walks over to a bank of mailboxes and scans the names on each one. “I didn’t, but I do now,” he says, pointing to a label bearing the name Dunkirk. Beneath the label is the number 401.
When Hurley turns away from the mailboxes I fall into step beside him, heading for the elevator. I pull one of the gloves out of my purse and palm it the way Hurley did in preparation for pushing the button but Hurley stops me with a hand on my shoulder and says, “No. We take the stairs.”
“Why?”
“We’re less likely to run into anyone.”
He heads for the stairs and takes them two at a time, bounding up the first flight with ease. I follow along and do the same, determined to show him I can keep up. But midway up the second flight my thighs start burning like a grease fire and my heart feels like it’s trying to claw its way out of my chest. I switch to taking the steps one at a time, wondering if this is Hurley’s way of punishing me for insisting he bring me along.
By the time I reach the fourth floor, I’m sweating, red-faced, and puffing like a steam engine. Hurley, on the other hand, looks cool, calm, and utterly relaxed.
Apartments 401 and 402 are on one side of the stairwell, 403 and 404 are on the other. None of the doors appear to have peepholes, a lucky break for us. Another thing in our favor is the lack of police tape on Callie’s apartment door. Though there is no way to know for sure if any police have been inside the place yet, I’m betting they have.
Hurley removes the item he had slipped into his pocket earlier, which I now see is a set of small tools. Their intended purpose becomes obvious when he slips two of the tools into the lock on Callie’s door and starts jiggling them around. I expect him to get the door open inside of a few seconds, the way it always seems to go on TV. But he fiddles and cusses under his breath for a long time before we finally hear the faint click of success.
“Glove time,” Hurley says.
After donning our respective gloves, Hurley opens the door to Callie’s apartment and we enter a large open area that serves as living room, kitchen, and dining room space. The main decor is minimalist and distinctly modern, but there are children’s items scattered about that clearly don’t fit: a high chair in the kitchen, a playpen in the dining room, and a swing in one corner of the living room. There is also a laundry basket full of toys at one end of the couch, several of them spilled out onto the floor. The place appears very clean and well organized, yet there is evidence of disarray in the crooked couch cushions, drawers that aren’t completely closed, and a pile of disorganized papers on the desk. Though I suppose these subtle bits of sloppiness might be attributable to Callie’s lack of housekeeping skills, there is a reckless, pitched-aside quality to it all that suggests the place has been searched.
“Are you looking for something specific?” I ask Hurley, who has zeroed in on a glass-topped desk in one corner of the dining room.
“Anything that might give me some answers.”
“It looks like the place has been gone through already.”
“It has. Callie was an extremely neat, organized person.”
He continues looking through the papers on top of the desk and then opens up a side file drawer that looks jam-packed. Figuring it will take him a while to sort through the contents, I head for the doors at the other end of the living room, guessing correctly that they will lead to the bedrooms.
In the smaller of the two, which is obviously little Jake’s room, there is a child’s bed shaped like a sports car, a large toy box painted in bright primary colors, a dresser that doubles as a changing table, and a menagerie of stuffed animals in a bright red hammock strung up in one corner. It’s a cute room but other than the changing table area, it has an empty, unused look to it.
As I enter the master bedroom, the initial impression is that it’s Callie’s room. There is a queen-sized bed covered with a white, down comforter that is slightly mussed as if it was pulled down and then carelessly tossed back into place. The pillowcases have lace tatting along the edges, and the curtains on the window, which overlooks the street, are also trimmed in a lacy pattern. The bed’s headboard, the bedside table, and the dresser are all done in a French provincial design, painted white with small lines of gold trim. All that whiteness would feel cold and sterile were it not for several scattered splashes of color: a handful of throw pillows on the bed done in rich jewel colors, a royal blue throw draped over the foot of the bed, a large barn-red rocking chair in front of the window, two bright green hanging plants, and a bookcase filled with a wide assortment of colorful tomes— everything from writing manuals and a legal reference, to paperback novels.
Though the bulk of the room clearly belongs to Callie, in a corner near the bathroom there is a crib. It, like the other furnishings in the room, is painted white but this blandness is offset by a colorful baby quilt, bright blue sheets, and a multicolored mobile of birds attached to the headboard.
A tremendous sense of sadness fills me as I look at the crib and think about little Jake growing up without his mother—wondering about her, hearing stories about her, seeing pictures of her, but having no real memories of her, just an aching persistent hole in his heart that he’ll never fully understand or be able to fill. I know because that’s how I feel about my dad. And Jake has no second parent to step in since no one seems to know who his father is.
I head for the bedside table, a place where people often keep intimate things, and open the top drawer. It’s filled with an eclectic mix of items: an eye mask, several paperback books, a bunch of loose change, a bottle containing an over-the-counter sleep aid, several notepads and pens, some lotion, some foot cream, and a pacifier.
After flipping through the notepads and discerning that all they contain are shopping lists and scribbled reminders, I close that drawer and open the bottom one, which sticks a bit. The only things it contains are dozens of pairs of socks. I rummage through them all, giving each pair a squeeze to make sure there isn’t anything inside them. As I push them back down into the drawer so I can close it, something odd strikes me. I pull open the top drawer again, look inside, and then step back to look at it from more of a distance. Even though both of the drawer
